I’ve posted a draft of my latest article, “The Constitutionality of Mandating Editorial Transparency,” forthcoming in the Hastings Law Journal later this year. As always, I hope you will check it out. Congress, state legislatures, and federal and state enforcement…
The number #1 question I get whenever I discuss FOSTA with folks who aren’t familiar with it: did Congress know what it was doing? Well, the answer is complicated. Many things have gone wrong with FOSTA, and those outcomes were…
The plaintiff is Rogan O’Handley, a California lawyer with elite credentials (UChicago Law, practice experience as a corporate finance and entertainment attorney) who nevertheless jumped onto the anti-“elites” Trump train 🙄 and embraced Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election…
Omegle enables real-time video and text chats with users assigned at random. The case involves an 11 year old girl who was a first-time Omegle user. The complaint alleges that a malefactor John Doe manipulated her into disrobing so he…
15 years ago, there was a now-mostly-forgotten battle royale over click fraud in Google AdWords (see links at the post’s bottom). Fun times. Since the resolution of that litigation, click fraud issues have largely faded into the background, flaring up…
A recap of emoji law developments in 2021: Court References I maintain a dataset of US court opinions that reference emojis and emoticons. I have compiled the dataset using keyword alerts in Westlaw and Lexis, supplemented by a few opinions…
Plaintiffs sued MyLife for selling background reports about them and furnishing “public reputation scores.” MyLife aggregates its data from third-party sources, but the plaintiffs “seek to hold Defendant liable for packaging and re-publishing this information on its website without their…
This case involves the Twitter account “@CallMeMoneyBags,” a pseudonymous account. In October 2020, the user posted 6 tweets attacking Brian Sheth, a private equity billionaire, that included photos “depicting a woman or portions of a woman’s body.” The opinion doesn’t…
As you recall, earlier this year Florida passed SB 7072, a brazenly censorial #MAGA bill. The district court enjoined the law, and Florida appealed to the 11th Circuit. In my last post, I recapped Florida’s appeal brief and the supporting…
Benjamin Crosswhite traveled in Jerry Falwell Jr.’s orbit. Reuters published allegedly defamatory stories about Crosswhite in August and September 2019. Crosswhite sued Reuters for defamation in March 2021. Virginia has a 1 year statute of limitations (SOL), which had a…